The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have let two Christmas plays pass before our soul. We may perhaps raise the thought: Are the first and second Christmas plays dedicated in the same sense to the great human cause that is so vividly before our soul these days? The two plays are fundamentally different, quite different from each other. One can hardly imagine two plays that are more different and yet are dedicated to the same subject. When we consider the first play, we see in all its parts the most wonderful simplicity, childlike simplicity. There is depth of soul, but it is breathed through and lived through everywhere with the most childlike simplicity. The second play moves on the heights of outer physical existence. It is immediately associated with the thought that the Christ Jesus enters the world as a king. He is confronted with the other king, Herod. Then it is shown that two worlds open up before us: the one that, in the good sense, develops humanity further, the world that Jesus Christ serves, and the other world that Ahriman and Lucifer serve, and which is represented by the devilish element. A cosmic, a cosmic-spiritual picture in the highest sense of the word! The connection between the development of humanity and the writing on the stars is immediately apparent. Not the simple, primitive clairvoyance of shepherds, which finds a “shine in the sky” that can be found in the simplest of circumstances, but the deciphering of the writing on the stars, for which all the wisdom of past centuries is necessary and from which one unravels what is to come. That which comes from other worlds shines into our world. In the states of dreaming and sleeping, that which is to happen is guided and directed; in short, occultism and magic permeate the entire play.

The two plays are fundamentally different. The first one comes to us, one may truly say, in childlike simplicity and innocence. Yet how infinitely admonishing it is, how infinitely sensitive. But let us first consider only the main idea. The human being who is to prepare the vessel for the Christ enters the world. Its entrance into the world is to be presented, to be demonstrated, that which Jesus is for the people into whose circle of existence he enters. Yes, my dear friends, this idea, this notion, has by no means conquered those circles so readily, within which such plays have been listened to with such fervor and devotion as this one. Karl Julius Schröer, of whom I have often spoken to you, was one of the first collectors of Christmas plays in the 19th century. He collected the Christmas plays in western Hungary, the Oberufer plays, from Bratislava eastwards, and he was able to study the way in which these plays lived and breathed among the people there. And it is very, very significant when you see how these plays were handed down from generation to generation in handwritten form, and how, not when Christmas was approaching, but when Christmas was approaching in the distant past, those who were found suitable for this in the village prepared to perform these plays. Then one sees how closely connected with the content of these plays was the whole annual cycle of life of the people in whose village circles such plays were performed. The time in the mid-19th century, for example, when Schröer collected these plays there, was already the time when they began to die out in the way they had been played until then. Many weeks before Christmas, the boys and girls in the village who were suitable to represent such games had to be found. And they had to prepare themselves. But the preparation did not consist merely of learning by heart and practicing what the play contained in order to represent it; rather, the preparation consisted in the fact that these boys and girls changed their whole way of life, their external way of life. From the time they began their preparations, they were no longer allowed to drink wine or consume alcohol. They were no longer allowed to fight on Sundays, as is usually the case in the village. They had to behave very modestly, they had to become gentle and mild, they were no longer allowed to beat each other up, and they were not allowed to do many other things that were otherwise quite common in villages, especially in those times. In this way, they also prepared themselves morally through the inner mood of their souls. And then it was really as if they were carrying something sacred around in the village when they performed their plays.

But this only came about slowly and gradually. Certainly, in many villages in Central Europe in the 19th century there was such a mood, the mood that at Christmas these plays were something sacred. But one can only go back to the 18th century and a little further, and this mood becomes more and more unholy. This mood was not there from the beginning, when these games came to the village, not at all from the beginning, but it only emerged and established itself over time. There were times, one does not even have to go back that far, when one could still find something different. There you could find the village gathering here or there in Central Europe, and a cradle in which the child lay, in which a child lay, not a manger, a cradle in which the child lay, and with it, indeed, the most beautiful girl in the village – Mary must have been beautiful! – but an ugly Joseph, an ugly-looking Joseph! Then a scene similar to the one you saw today was performed. But above all: when it was announced that the Christ was coming, the whole community appeared, and each person stepped on the cradle. Above all, everyone wanted to have stepped on the cradle and rocked the Christ Child, that was what it was all about, and they made a tremendous racket, which was supposed to express that the Christ had come into the world. And in many such older plays, there is a terrible mockery of Joseph, who has always been depicted as an old man in these times, who was laughed at.

How did these plays, which were of this nature, actually come into the people? Well, we must of course remember that the first form of the greatest, most powerful earthly idea, the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth, was the idea of the savior who had passed through death, of the one who, through death, won for the earth what we call the meaning of the earth. It was the suffering of Christ that first came into the world in early Christianity. And to the suffering Christ, after all, sacrifices were offered in the various acts that took place in the cycle of the year. But only very slowly and gradually did the child conquer the world. The dying savior first conquered the world, only slowly and gradually did the child conquer it. We must not forget that the liturgy was in Latin and that the people understood nothing. Only gradually did people begin to see something more in the sacrifice of the Mass, which was fixed for Christmas, besides the sacrifice of the Mass that was celebrated three times at Christmas. Perhaps not without good reason – if not for him personally, then for his followers – the idea of showing the mystery of Jesus to the faithful on Christmas night is attributed to Francis of Assisi, who, out of a certain opposition to the old forms and spirit of the church, held his entire doctrine and his entire being. And so we gradually, slowly see how the believing community at Christmas should be offered something that was connected with the great mystery of humanity, with the coming down of Christ Jesus to earth. At first, a manger was set up and figures were merely made. It was not acted out by people, but figures were made: the infant Jesus and Joseph and Mary – but in three dimensions. Gradually, this was replaced by priests dressing up and acting it out in the simplest way. And it was only in the 13th or 14th century that the mood began to develop within the communities that could be described as people saying to themselves: We also want to understand something of what we see, we want to penetrate into the matter. And so people began to be allowed to play individual parts in what was initially only played by the clergy. Now, of course, one must know life in the middle of the Middle Ages to understand how that which was connected with the most sacred was at the same time taken in such a way as I have indicated. At that time it was entirely possible out of a sense of accommodation, so that the village community, the whole community, could say: I too rocked a little with my foot at the cradle where Christ was born! — out of the accommodation of this mood. It could be expressed in this and in many other ways, in the singing that accompanied it, which at times intensified to the point of yodeling, in all that had taken place. But that which was alive in the matter had in itself the strength, one might almost say, to transform itself out of a profane, out of a profanation of the Christmas idea, into the most sacred itself. And the idea of the child appearing in the world conquered the holy of holies in the hearts of the simplest people.

That is the wonderful thing about these plays, of which the first was one that was not simply there as it now appears to us, but became so: piety first unfolding in the mood out of impiety, through the power of that which they represent! The Child had first to conquer hearts, had first to find entrance into hearts. Through that which was holy in Itself, It sanctified hearts that at first encountered It with rudeness and untamedness. That is the wonderful thing about the developmental history of these plays, how the mystery of Christ still has to conquer hearts and souls piece by piece. And tomorrow we will take a closer look at some of what has been conquered step by step. Today I would just like to say: it is not without reason that I noticed how admonishingly even the simplest thing is presented in the first game.

As I said, slowly and gradually that which came into the world with the mystery of Christ entered into the hearts and souls of human beings. And it is actually the case that the further one goes back in the tradition of the various mysteries of Christ, the more one sees that the form of expression is an elevated one, a spiritually elevated one. I would like to say that the further back one goes, the more one enters into a “cosmic utterance”. We have already incorporated some of this into our reflections, and in the previous Christmas lecture I showed how Gnostic ideas were used to understand the deep mystery of Christ. But even if we follow this or that even in the later periods of the Middle Ages, we find that, as late as the Middle Ages, something is present in the Christmas poems of that time that was later absent: an emphasis on the early Christian idea that Christ descends from the heights of the spirit. We find it in the 11th and 12th centuries when we bring such a Christmas carol before our soul:

The honor of the incarnate Son of God
Is proclaimed by the heavenly hosts, rejoicing and exulting;
And loudly resounds from the shepherd's mouth
The joyful tidings.

“Glory in the highest! And peace on earth!”
So it resounds in solemn song;
With wonder it is seen by men today,
What never happened before.

The heavens shine brightly with a new star;
Guided by it, from afar come
the wise men, and greet with delight
the sight of them.

With him, truth has now been born anew.
What was lost through sin has been replaced;
In the light of grace, the fruits of blessing
Bloom more gloriously.

The punishment of the past has now been revealed,
Since this fruit has sprung from the earth,
Which grants us life and refreshment,
And nourishes forever.

He has come, clothed in our flesh,
The good shepherd who tends all nations;
He has dwelt, like us, in pilgrim huts,
Suffered for us.

Hail then to the earth that saw his light!
Through him for time and eternity beglücker,
Consecrate everyone to him, the Savior, thanks and love
With pure impulses.

Help us, Christ, to fulfill Your law ourselves,
Through You, let us succeed in doing good deeds,
So that one day, the crown of eternal life
will also reward us!

Such was the tone that resonated from those who had still understood something of the cosmic significance of the mystery of Christ.

Or there was another Christmas poem from the middle of the Middle Ages, a little later than the Carolingian period:

The Son of God, begotten from eternity, who invisibly and without end,
Through whom the heavens and the earth were built, and all that dwells there was created,
Through whom the days and the hours pass and return;
Whom the angels in the heavenly castle always praise in fully harmonious singing,
Freed from all original sin, clothed in a weak body,
He, who took from Mary, the Virgin, destroyed the guilt of the first father Adam
As well as the lust of the mother Eve.
Today's glorious day of sublime splendor testifies that now the son,
The true sun, dispelled the ancient darkness of the world with the beam of his light.
Now the night is illuminated by the light of that new star,
Which once amazed the sky-wise gaze of the magicians,
And see, that shine for the shepherds, who were blinded
By the lofty splendor of the heavenly inhabitants.
Rejoice, Mary, Mother of God, for at your birth you were attended by a host of angels
singing your praises.
O Christ, only Son of the Father, who for our sake took on the nature of man,
of man, so you revive your own who plead here.
O Jesus, graciously hear the pleas of those whom you have deigned to take care of,
to make them, O God's Son, partakers of your divinity.

This is the tone that, I would say, sounds from the heights of more theologically colored scholarship down to the people.

Now we also hear a little of the sound that rang out at Christmas from the people themselves, when a soul was found that expressed the people's feelings:

He is powerful and strong,
who was born to win,
That is Saint Knist.
yes, praise be to thee in all that is, Niewan the deep
because of his great arrogance
so hell became his portion.

In hell is Michael out of place
who has his home there,
Your sun never shines so brightly,
the moon does not help him,
Only the bright stars,
yes, he has to see everything,
yes, he would love to be in heaven so much.

In heaven there is a house,
a golden gate opens therein,
the windows are the pearls of pity,
which adorn our little house
with precious stones:
no one enters there,
he is cleansed of all sins so pure.

He who gladly goes to church
and stands there without sinning,
may well live joyfully,
he will be given
the angels' common lot,
if he so desires:
in heaven, life is so pure.

I have long served
alas a man
Who walks around in the darkness
and has sworn an oath at my wrongdoing,
His reward is evil.
Help me, Holy Spirit,
to free myself from his delusion.

That is the prayer that the simple man said and understood. We have read the descent, now we have the ascent.

I will try to reproduce this 12th-century Christmas carol so that we can see how the simple man also grasped the full greatness of Christ and related it to the whole of cosmic life:

He is mighty and strong, who was born at Christmas. This is the Holy Christ. Everything that is there praises him, except for the devil, who, through his great arrogance, was sent to hell. There is much filth in hell – “much” is the old word for great, mighty – there is much filth in hell. He who has his home there, who is at home in hell, must realize: the sun never shines there, the moon does not help, nor do the bright stars. There everyone who sees something must say to himself how nice it would be if he could go to heaven. He would very much like to be in heaven. In the kingdom of heaven stands a house. A golden path leads to it. The columns are marble, that is, made of marble, adorned with precious stones. But no one enters there who is not completely pure from sin. Anyone who goes to church and stands there without envy may well have a higher life, for there are always young ones, that is, when he has finally ended his life. Remember, I once introduced the word “younger” from the ether body here. Here you have it in the vernacular! So when he is given “young” to the angelic community, he can certainly wait for it, because in heaven life is pure. — And now he who prays this Christmas carol says: I have unfortunately served a man who walks around in hell, who has developed my certain deed. Help me, holy Christ, to be released from his captivity, that is, to be released from the prison of the evil one. So that is in the language of the people:

He is mighty and strong
Who was born at Christmas...

on the occasion of a performance of the Paradeis-Spiel and the Christ-Geburt-Spiel for German internees from Basel and Bern.

Allow me, before all else, to extend to you my warmest greetings and express our satisfaction at being able to see you in our midst today! Please accept what we are about to offer you as something quite modest. It is not intended to be a sample of an excellent performance or a special artistic achievement, but rather, I would say, more of a historical presentation. And so that expectations are not raised too high, I would just like to hint at how it came about that we have been performing these two and some other such Christmas plays, Paradeis plays and the like, in a somewhat indirect relationship with our cause for years in a simple, primitive way.

These are not actually Christmas plays or New Year's plays, as one might otherwise see them, although of course there is a similarity. I myself came up with these Christmas plays because when I came to the Vienna Technical University in 1879, I met a professor there who then became a very close friend of mine: Karl Julius Schröer. I myself consider Karl Julius Schröer – he has been dead for many years – to be one of the most important Germanic researchers of modern times, although, as is the case with many important people, he has received very little recognition. He was initially a professor at the University of Budapest, then he spent a long time at the German Lyceum in Bratislava, a city on the way from Vienna to Budapest. And after the Germanist researcher Weinhold had first begun to record the existing remains of old Christmas and New Year plays, Karl Julius Schröer in the 1850s became aware from Pressburg of special representations of Christmas and New Year plays, Paradeis plays, which took place among the local farmers near Pressburg.

These Christmas plays are, of course, related to the Christmas plays and New Year plays in German-speaking areas that are otherwise collected. However, I would say that the plays collected by Schröer from the Oberufer region – which can be reached on foot from Pressburg in half an hour and is a German enclave – are more genuine, to the extent that they are a historical document. They are more genuine than those in the other areas. They have been preserved in such a way that the farmers, who were considered suitable, were simply summoned by one of their elders in the fall, when there was no longer any field work to be done. And now these Christmas plays, which have been preserved traditionally, were rehearsed. I would say that they were rehearsed in a truly beautiful and solemn way, not as if it were just something artistic that one wanted to accomplish, but rather it was connected to the whole heartfelt unfolding of the people. You can see this from the fact that those farmers who were allowed to participate in the play, that is, those who were supposed to act in it, really did prepare themselves morally during the weeks when the rehearsals took place and when they were supposed to learn their lines. They should be morally worthy to perform in these plays.

There were four conditions that the oldest, who had those manuscripts that were passed down from generation to generation, communicated. So those who were allowed to learn these things had to fulfill four conditions. The first was that they were not allowed to go to a Dirndl during the time when they were supposed to be learning and preparing for the performances; secondly, they were not allowed to sing Schelmenlieder, which was explicitly presented to them as a kind of catechism; thirdly, they were not allowed to get drunk, committing any kind of excess, which was otherwise, of course, common practice in these areas on Sundays; and fourthly, they had to obediently obey the one who was the oldest and who taught them these things, who rehearsed them with them, and so on. If they were found worthy, a copy was given to them, and they were allowed to keep it. The following year, those who were further designated had to have these things copied. So it was not that easy for Schröer to get them right when he found out that such things were being performed out in the country. Because the things had been copied from year to year. A Christmas play had even been very corrupted in 1809 during a flood; and it was also very difficult to read, with various passages missing in different manuscripts. But they were so ingrained in this people that, for example, Schröer, when he was making these lists, realized from certain contexts: Something must be missing there. So he called in a man who had taught the lessons and said: Think about whether something is missing. Yes, yes, said the man, and was then sometimes able to recite pages of whole verses that had been left out and forgotten for years.

So, these things were rehearsed, weren't they? And as I said, in the four weeks before Christmas until Epiphany, they were performed among the farmers. And we would like to give you a kind of historical memory: with this. While the Christmas play performances can be traced back to the 11th century, they have remained in the form in which they had lived in the 16th and 17th centuries. And they remained conservative. From year to year, the same form was performed. It was then performed so that the farmers went around to the various villages; no other music was allowed to be heard. Schröer himself once saw that the farmers were received with music in a village where they went to perform the plays. They were very offended, because they said they were not comedians. They really performed it, I would say, like a kind of worship.

We actually wanted to perform it in the simple, primitive way that the farmers did it, but there are some things we can't do. The farmers went around the village; the things were simply performed in an ordinary inn. And there are still many other things that we cannot do in the same way. The devil, for example, always dressed much earlier, went through the village with a cow horn, blew into the windows and told the people that they had to come. If he found a cart, he jumped up, pulled the people down and took them to the performance. And so the people went from village to village and performed these things in dialect, in an Austrian dialect, quite similar to Bavarian, a southern German dialect that is native to the areas around Bratislava.

From this point of view, I ask you to take these things, preserved from earlier centuries, as unpretentiously as they are meant.

on the occasion of the performance of the Christmas plays: the Paradise Play and the Shepherds' Play, to which guests were invited.

First of all, I would like to take the liberty of welcoming our esteemed guests here today and express our satisfaction at having you here with us. I would then like to say a few words about what we actually intend with the performances that we will now attempt in a modest way. I would ask you to consider the performances as a modest attempt. We cannot, of course, offer anything complete or perfect in any respect.

These are so-called Christmas plays, but Christmas plays that differ in some respects from the others that are performed more and more every year. I would like to briefly mention how I myself came to draw our friends' attention to these Christmas plays to be presented here. When I came to the university in Vienna in 1879, I met Professor Schröer, whose lectures I first attended and who then became a very good friend of mine. He is not well known outside professional circles, but I believe he has made and will continue to make outstanding contributions, particularly to the study of German dialects in Austria and, later, to research into Goethe. In the 1850s, he devoted himself not only to the study of German dialects as they existed among the individual German ethnic groups in the Austrian monarchy, but also to the study of folk customs and the various, I would say, folk cultural treasures. He was a professor at the German Lyceum in Bratislava, which is located on the line between Vienna and Budapest, and then a professor in Budapest; later at the Evangelical School in Vienna and a professor at the Technical University in Vienna. That's where I met him.

Now, in the 1950s, after Weinhold had begun collecting various Christmas plays, especially from Silesia, Schröer discovered that in the vicinity of Bratislava, in the so-called Oberufer region, in a corner that is a German enclave, old Christmas plays are still alive. These Christmas plays were performed by the farmers directly during the so-called Holy Season in every winter. We know that such Christmas plays can be traced historically; but they probably go back much further, to the 10th or 11th century. They took, as we know, their starting point from the church; they were initially based on the nativity plays, on the passion plays that were performed in the churches. But then they were separated from the churches and came into the people. Since then, many such Christmas plays have been collected, later by Hartmann and other Germanists, and now, since the suggestion was made, they are being performed in the most diverse places: Palatinate, Upper Bavarian Christmas plays and so on. All these Christmas plays that you can see elsewhere differ in some way from those that Karl Julius Schröer was able to collect in the Pressburg area from the so-called Haidbauern, as these farmers were called in the Oberufer area. He developed a keen sense for these things precisely because he had devoted himself to researching the customs and institutions of these scattered German tribes in the Oberufer region, including the so-called Heanzen, a German enclave, the Zipser Germans, the Transylvanians, the Gottschee Germans, everywhere among the individual tribes that were taken out of the context of German-speaking areas and colonized in these areas, where you can find strange things. So that one can say: the Christmas plays that live in the other areas, in the closed German-speaking areas, have developed further, while here we have preserved something in these plays that dates from the 16th century, at the latest from the first beginnings of the 17th century, and has been preserved as such. The people migrated east, took the things with them, and preserved them as they originally had in their former German homeland. The things that had always been kept in such a way that they survived from year to year in certain families went through the centuries with the generations. Every year, those who were chosen by an older, experienced man to do so, and whom he found suitable among the farm boys and farm girls, had to copy them. At the time when the grape harvest was over, the people were chosen who he thought worthy of performing the things; they were then copied, and because they each had to copy them individually, the older manuscripts in particular were lost. The manuscript on which the one pastoral play that we will see today is based may perhaps date from the beginning of the 18th century; this can be determined from the fact that it contained smudged ink because it survived a flood in 1809 that threatened the area, so that, according to the copy, we have a fairly old form before us.

But these things live on in the consciousness of the people in a very wonderful way. Since some of the manuscripts were corrupted, things were occasionally left out; this could be seen from the things that did not match in the beginnings and endings. And Schröer then questioned an old farmer, who had been the keeper of the lore for some time, and said: “You, remember, there must be something missing!” And then the man really did recall whole verses from his memory, which could be inserted. So the things lived on well in the people: from the 16th, beginning of the 17th century among these present-day farmers of the Oberufer region. Today, for the most part, everything has materialized; the things are actually extinct. It is possible that it can still be found in isolated areas in weak latecomers.

Now it is particularly interesting that the farmers who performed it were just farmers and not artists. We are trying to set up the performance in such a way that it gives a picture of what it was like among the farmers. I myself have often talked about it with Schröer. We were both extremely interested in it, and I was able to get a picture of how things were among the farmers in the 15th century. It is interesting, however, that a certain mood was associated with the things, which is characterized by the fact that the people who were allowed to play along not only prepared themselves by learning things by heart, rehearsing and so on, but also prepared themselves morally, so to speak. Each person received a piece of paper with the rules he had to follow. If he was considered worthy to play, he had to fulfill four conditions. The performance then began with the first Sunday of Advent, continued through Christmas and into the time of the Epiphany, and some even lasted until the carnival season. But as I said, the players were given a piece of paper on which they had written their moral conditions. Firstly, those who had to play along were not allowed, and this is very important – if you have lived among farmers, you know that these four conditions are extremely important – they were not allowed, and I quote literally, to go to a girl's house during the whole time; secondly, they were not allowed to sing rogue songs or the like; thirdly, they were not allowed to lead a life that could be challenged in any way during the whole time, so they had to live a very modest life, that is, they had to prepare themselves morally, and fourthly, they had to obey unconditionally the one who, as the oldest, was their teacher and who rehearsed these things with them.

Then these things were rehearsed, and they then had to perform them in an inn. The set-up was such that the benches for the audience were simply placed in a horseshoe shape, and the play was performed in the middle of the hall, so that those who listened and those who played were in the same room. People regarded it as a thoroughly festive occasion and not at all as something comical. For example, when the people were parading through the village, such a company, as they were called – a company = the whole ensemble of actors playing together, that was called the company – was once greeted with secular music. They explained that they did not want that, they were not actors, and that they should not be subjected to such treatment.

Now, I would like to note that ribaldry occurs in things that one might even laugh and smile at from time to time, despite the fact that they are the highest matters of humanity in the play; this must be attributed to the overall mood from which such things arise in the peasantry. It must be clear to everyone that in the peasantry, the highest matters are not actually treated sentimentally, but that the most sacred things can be mixed with the funny and the bawdy. For the peasant mind and for the peasant soul, this does not at all desecrate the highest matters – in the areas there, I mean. The people who listened to it did not just want to listen to things with long faces and in a sentimental mood, but they wanted to have something at the same time that pushed them beyond sentimentality. If you see the Shepherds' Play, you will notice that the child is not just placed in the manger; but the shepherds were instructed by their teacher not just to worship the child, but to set up the manger like a cradle – and actually weigh something with their feet. So that a cheerful mood was actually mixed into the very serious and solemn mood.

I notice that in these plays we have something that has had a balancing, harmonizing effect on the population at the same time. The population in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when these plays were still performed, was half Protestant and half Catholic, one might say. While they were otherwise strictly separated in their religious services and religious practices, they came together in these plays. It is very strange how, when you delve deeper into what has developed from the culture of the vernacular, you find connections that point to ancient human predispositions. Just as a poet wrote a poem in the Lower Austrian German dialect that is like the Homeric Songs in Lower Austrian dialect in hexameters, we see the emergence of something that is called here: the singing of the companionship, something that, despite the differences, is reminiscent of the ancient choruses of Greek tragedy.

Of course, we cannot present details that arose in connection with the farming culture here. You will see later that the devil plays a certain role in one of the plays. The devil was not just used as a fellow player. The people moved from village to village, these were the actual Oberufer village S. Martin, Salendorf, Nikolas and so on, the people moved around and performed in the inns that were designated for these things. But the devil got dressed earlier and walked through the village with a cow horn and blew it into all the windows, calling the people together. Of course we can't imitate that here, can we. When he saw a wagon coming, he would jump up and tell the people that they had to come with him to see something beautiful. These were performances that, I would say, held the whole culture together at that time.

Now, we will perform two of these plays. In the peasant performances, there was always a third play, but we don't have an edition of that. It was a carnival play. Usually the sequence was that first the shepherd play was played, then the Paradeis play (we will present it the other way around here), and finally, like a kind of satirical play, which in turn is reminiscent of ancient institutions, a carnival play was performed. So it was a real trilogy. We just don't have the carnival play here.

So now I ask you to listen to the things in the dialect, which is very similar to the Bavarian-Austrian dialect, but still differs in some ways. It is intended to be only a modest attempt, which is only indirectly related to our anthroposophical work, an attempt to extract the spiritual life of a particular age and to continue it historically. I would like to say: it should be a historical attempt to present a piece of culture that cannot be seen otherwise, in a modest way.

The music is by our friend Mr. van der Pals, with the exception of the chorales, which are old, and was composed especially for these Christmas plays.

on the occasion of the performance of old German Christmas plays for German prisoners of war interned in Switzerland.

On behalf of all friends of our anthroposophical movement and especially those who are united here at this building, I have the deepest satisfaction today to greet you most warmly. You will believe in the sincere warmth of this greeting. After all, the feelings we have for you are imbued with everything we are experiencing as a result of those painful events of the present, which are having such a profound impact not only on the general fate of the world, but also on the fate of each individual, especially those whose visit we are meant to be here today.

What we would like to offer you are Christmas plays. These performances should be taken without pretension; we ask you to bear this in mind. They are an attempt to revive old memories of European culture. And perhaps I can most easily explain what these plays are about if I take the liberty of drawing your attention to how I myself first became acquainted with them.

The content of these games is not directly related to our anthroposophical movement, but this is only apparent. Only someone who misunderstands anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can believe that such tasks as those associated with these Christmas games are not within its scope. After all, the interest in everything that concerns the spiritual life and the development of humanity must be within its scope.

I myself was introduced to these plays decades ago, and specifically to the plays that are to be rehearsed here today, through my old friend and teacher, Karl Julius Schröer. Karl Julius Schröer discovered precisely these plays, which are old, which have been performed somewhere, there or there, in earlier times and which are now being renewed. You can see many such games everywhere. But the two games we will be talking about today, and some others, differ from other Christmas games in quite a significant way. Karl Julius Schröer found them on the island of Oberufer in the forties and fifties of the 19th century. This is an island off the island of Schütt, which is formed by the Danube below Pressburg, where Hungary borders Austria. Since the 16th or at least since the beginning of the 17th century, these Christmas plays have been preserved among the German farmers, the so-called Haidbauern, all in personal tradition. They have been passed down from generation to generation. The Haidbauer, from whom Karl Julius Schröer took them over, had actually only copied the individual roles. A complete manuscript of these things was hardly found. They were performed every year by the Oberufer farmers, whenever they could, when the people among the farmers of Upper Hungary had the time.

Let us first take a brief look at how it was done. I would like to describe it in the following way. When the autumn work, the harvest work, was done, one of the most respected farmers in the area, who had inherited these games and the right to perform them from his ancestors, would gather a group of young men and rehearse with them from October, November to December, right through to Advent. The sentiment associated with the performance of these plays is actually what is most touching about the matter. It was truly, by going to the performance of these plays revealing the biblical mysteries, that the whole thing was associated with a deep moral consciousness. This is already evident from the conditions imposed on those who wanted to play in them. The farmer who was in charge of the plays in the 1850s communicated these conditions to Karl Julius Schröer in the following way. He said: “Those boys who were allowed to perform, who were to play a role in the plays, had to fulfill the following conditions for the entire period of preparation until the festival: first, they were not allowed to visit any of the girls during that time; second, they were not allowed to sing any rogue songs; and thirdly, they had to lead an honorable life throughout the weeks, which was obviously a very difficult fact for some; fourthly, they had to follow the master unreservedly in all things related to the preparations for the games, who rehearsed them with them. That was just one of the most respected farmers.

These plays were performed in front of Catholics and Protestants mixed together, and the performers themselves were too. The plays had a religious character, but not the slightest confessional character. And hostility from any side towards what was to be presented in these plays was actually only on the part of the “intellectuals” in Oberufer. Even back then, the intelligentsia was opposed to such folksy Christmas plays, to such performances inspired by that ethos. Fortunately for us, the intelligentsia at that time consisted of a single schoolmaster who was also the mayor and notary. He was a single personality, but he was dead set against the plays. And the farmers had to perform them in defiance of the local authorities.

Only boys were allowed to participate in the performances as actors. For obvious reasons, we have to refrain from this practice; in fact, we cannot imitate some of the refinements associated with those performances, although we try to give an idea of what the farmers were able to offer back then through our own performances.

The boys also had to play the female roles. Eva, Maria and so on were played by boys. After weeks of rehearsals, the whole procession of players set off. In front walked someone carrying a so-called Kranawittbaum, a juniper tree used as a symbol of paradise or a Christmas tree. Behind him came the star-bearer, who carried the star on a pole or on a so-called “scissors”. You will see it later: the scissors are designed so that the star can be made closer or further away by rolling up the star scissors. And so the procession moved towards the inn where the performance was to take place. The clothing of those people who played a part, except for the devil and the angel, was only put on in the inn itself. While the people were dressing, the devil, whom you will also get to know, ran around the village, making mischief with a cow horn, drawing attention to himself, speaking to people. In short, he made sure that as many people as possible appeared in the inn where the performance was to take place. The performance itself was such that the audience sat in a kind of horseshoe shape, with the stage in the middle of this horseshoe, which of course we cannot imitate either.

You will see that it is essentially biblical memories that were performed. First of all – the performances were staged between three and five o'clock – the Shepherds' Christmas Play was usually performed, which we present here as the second play. It depicted the proclamation of Christ Jesus by the angel, the birth of Christ Jesus, that is, everything that our second play, the Shepherds' Play, will present. Then came the Fall of Man, which depicts the Fall of Man in Paradise – our first play to be performed today – followed, as a rule, by a carnival play. Just as in ancient Greek tragedy a satyr play always followed the drama, so here a carnival play, a comic epilogue, followed. It is noteworthy that the characters who represented sacred individuals – Mary, Joseph and so on, who appeared in the first plays – were not allowed to appear in the carnival play; a certain religious sentiment was associated with these plays.

Some of the details are very interesting to follow. If you watch the Shepherds' Play – the second to be performed – today, you will see three innkeepers, at whom the wandering Joseph, who is portrayed as an old man in all these plays, seeks shelter for himself and Mary. They are rejected by the first two innkeepers and led to the stable by the third. This was originally different, but it is still portrayed as such in Oberufer: originally there was an innkeeper, a landlady and her maid. And the idea was linked to that: the innkeeper rejects Joseph and Mary, as does the landlady, only the maid offers them shelter in the stable. Because it probably became difficult to find the necessary young people to play the innkeeper and her maid during the performances, the roles were then transferred to two other innkeepers, so that we now have three innkeepers. But as I said, with the old Oberufer play, this is definitely not to be taken in the same way as with the other Christmas plays. The Christmas plays, Easter plays, Passion plays and so on go back to ancient performances, which all actually originated from church celebrations. In the churches, the clergy originally performed all kinds of things related to the Holy History after the Christmas celebrations, Easter celebrations and so on. Then, in particular due to the fact that the audience grew larger and larger and that the stories were translated from Latin into the vernacular, the games gradually moved from the ecclesiastical to the secular and were performed outside of the church by farmers.

And so we present these games to you here. They have been preserved in their original form, which they probably took on in the 16th century. They have been preserved because they most likely originated in southern Germany during the early days of German development, namely in the Lake Constance area. When the various tribes that originally came from the Lake Constance area of southern Germany migrated to Austria and Hungary in earlier centuries, they took these games with them. These games were also present in the homeland, but in the homeland they were constantly changing. There were numerous people, clergy, scholars, who had influence over these things, and the things were corrupted. They were preserved unadulterated under the care of those who, in the midst of the Slavic and Magyar populations, had to rely on themselves and who, over the centuries, preserved things in their original form. That is why it was a real find for Schröer when he discovered these games among the Germans of Upper Hungary in the forties and fifties of the 19th century. For those with a more refined sensibility, they are not at all what the Christmas plays that are so frequently performed today, which have changed over the centuries, are. Rather, they are truly something that takes us back to a part of Europe's past in centuries past. Karl Julius Schröer was particularly suited to preserve something like this. He was truly an exemplary man, a remarkable man, and his memory must be preserved with such things; he was deeply imbued with the idea of how such and similar things actually created the cement that culturally held together this state structure of Austria on the land that was created by those colonists who migrated from the Rhine, from southern Germany, from central Germany, migrated to Upper Hungary, migrated from west to east; also to Styria, to the more southern regions of Hungary, migrated as the Zipser Saxons to Transylvania, migrated as Swabians to the Banat, which, I would like to say, tragically gave up the land on which this culture developed. Now, Schröer was completely imbued with this cultural idea when he refreshed the old memories contained in the Christmas plays. He did many other things as well. And when you immersed yourself with him in his cultural studies, which were so devoid of all coloration of chauvinism but which were deeply imbued with the cultural mission associated with them, you first recognized the full value of the life's work of this man, who collected everything that had already been more or less eradicated from these areas by the mid-19th century due to the spreading cultural trends that dominate this area today. He left us his grammar and dictionaries of the German dialects in Hungary and the Spiš region, which he had carefully prepared, and the Heanzen and Gottscheer dialects, which he treated based on the grammar. His life's work, which he dedicated to literary history and Goethe, actually left a wonderful description of everything that brings together the entire German element, which underlies all cultural areas of this Central European state of Austria as the actual cultural cement. And that is what lives on as a special idea in the research of Karl Julius Schröer. So that we do not just have the product of philological or linguistic scholarship before us, but something that has been collected with heart and mind for that which lives as spirit in these things. And that is why it is so satisfying to be able to refresh these things a little.

Our friend Leopold van der Pals has tried to refresh the musical element of these things a little, and with his music you will see the performances here. So one can say that what we are offering you here is the product of the real mystery plays, the various Christmas plays, as they were spread throughout Europe in earlier centuries. But they should not be preserved in the form in which, for example, the world has caricatured the so-called Oberammergau Passion Plays. There is nothing left of what was actually intended in those ancient times.

However, some things cannot be revived. For example, a special way of reciting the play, which was still practised among the farmers in the old way, even in the 1950s, cannot be revived. With the exception of particularly solemn moments, when God the Father speaks and the like, everything that was presented was presented by the actors in such a way that they spoke in the spirit of their verse. The verse had four uplifts, he appeared, the tone moved by one tone on the fourth uplift. A certain person, let's say: Joseph, whom you will find later, the husband of Mary, for example, spoke the first heave in the pitch C, then E, then F, then went back again on the fourth heave. The other characters spoke in such a way that they began with a C, and then had the pitch E three times, then went back to C again. With great art, but with a simple, restrained art, these things were presented and one really felt the Christmas and Easter mood with transitions into the secular, without sentimentality, without any element of sentimentality. So in these things is contained what people felt and sensed as their spiritual life when they stepped out of the church into the world.

Some passages that may be more difficult to understand will also be explained. The whole thing was of course presented in the local dialect, and there are many things in it that may not be immediately understandable. For example, in the Paradise play, God the Father is referred to as “a Reeb.”

When it is said: Eve was made from a rib, you must not think that it is a wrong pronunciation here, when it is said that Eve is created by God the Father from a rib of Adam. The farmer really does not say rib, but rib. The devil then reports in the course of the Herod play once, he has a few rats. Ratten is a corruption of Ratten. Then perhaps it is not generally known the word “Kletzen”.

Hätten Adam und Eva Kletzen gfress'n,
's wär ihna tausendmal nützer gwes'n.

Now, Kletzen is something that was always eaten at Christmas in the area where the plays were performed: it is made from dried plums and pears. This is said so that people have something to latch onto that they already know. Then there is the word frozzeln, which the devil uses. It means to tease, to mock, to make fun of. There are a number of expressions in both games that may not be immediately understandable.

So you will see that one saying in particular is used by the innkeepers:

I åls a wirt von meiner gstålt
Håb in mein haus and logament gwålt.

One might think that the innkeeper thinks he is an innkeeper of a particular stature, shape and has power in his house. But this refers to rank. I, as an innkeeper of my rank, of my standing. He who is so well-positioned, has such prestige, has power in his house, namely the power to attract customers to his inn. So, an innkeeper who knows how to give his house such a reputation as I do, has the power to bring his house into such a reputation that it has many people as guests. That is what is meant by this expression. Clamor means rumor; the farmer uses the word for a rumor that spreads. The angel says: Elizabeth is in the rumor that she is barren. - So it means: the rumor is that she is barren. But the farmer says: rumor, he does not say: the rumor. Then you will hear the word from one of the shepherds: all around. That happens often, it is the custom.

I lent him my gloves, as I often do. Then you will often find the word bekern among the shepherd's speeches. This is common in the area where the games were played for something that has happened; a story that has been told. When they see each other, they say: they were cold, frozen; or the expression: the ground is as smooth as a mirror.

An especially pretty word is the way one shepherd is made aware that it is already late, that the birds are already chirping – in the farming language, that is piewen.

Stichl, get up, the forest creatures are squeaking already.

In the second line, Gallus says:

Stichl, get up, the carters are cracking their whips on the road.

Kleschen, that's cracking the whip. The carters are already cracking their whips on the road.

These are some of the remarks I wanted to make at the beginning of our performance. Overall, the plays speak for themselves. They are the most beautiful reflection of everything that took place in earlier centuries throughout Central Europe, in such festive plays. For example, there is the St. Gallen manuscript, which consists of 340 verses. There are plays that go back to the 11th century. But I believe that all that exists in this regard cannot quite match the intimacy that lies precisely in the Oberufer plays, which were preserved in the Pressburg area until the 1850s.

It is fair to say that these games are among those things that have unfortunately been lost, that have disappeared and that one would so much like to revive. For they are truly such that through them one remembers what is so intimately connected with the development of our spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to say to you before the performance.

On behalf of all those who are involved in the construction and the work on the building, and on behalf of all those who work in our Anthroposophical Society, I would like to warmly welcome you as our dear guests and express our great joy that you want to take a look at these unpretentious games of ours – Christmas games. I will take the liberty of saying a few words about these games and will start by describing how we actually came up with these games, the performance of which is somewhat loosely connected to our endeavors, but which, as you will see, are in fact properly integrated into our endeavors.

The plays that we will present to you come from the former German region of Upper Hungary, from western Upper Hungary, from Oberufer. They came to Oberufer through immigrants who migrated from more western areas to this eastern part of Central Europe, probably as early as the 16th century, or at least at the beginning of the 17th century. It is precisely because they were found in this German colony that they are particularly interesting; more interesting than similar other Christmas and Easter plays, of which there are many, especially now that they are performed here and there. The ones we are presenting were collected by my dear old friend, the late Karl Julius Schröer, in the 1850s and 1860s in Oberufer near Pressburg among the local farmers. That is to say, he learned from his residence in Pressburg that the so-called German Haidbauern, who had immigrated centuries ago, would perform certain plays in the manner that I will describe in a moment when the Christmas season approached. He then often participated in such plays. He liked them very much and was then able to write down what the individual farmers, who were fellow players, copied down as roles for such plays. And then he was able to put the pieces together.

Karl Julius Schröer's intention was to preserve the spiritual heritage that had been preserved in such regions from ancient times – for such things are indeed ancient times. Because the times when Karl Julius Schröer found these plays there were also the times when this old culture was already dying out, replaced by the newer form. And all those similar plays that are performed more in the west of Europe and that, if one has only a rough sense of them, can indeed remind one of the older Christmas plays, as we will hear and see them today, are less interesting because in the areas where they were performed, they were later changed from decade to decade and, one might say, increasingly modernized, so that they no longer have the genuine, exemplary form. On the other hand, we have preserved the genuine form of these games in the 16th century in the games of the farmers in the Zipser and other areas of Hungary, where German farmers settled and preserved German culture as a kind of cultural ferment. It was the case that these people continued to play these games in the exact same way from decade to decade, and that is why they could still be found in the 19th century in the same form in which they had been introduced in the 16th century. That is why these games, which we are trying to present to you in this weak attempt, are particularly interesting.

The institutions that Karl Julius Schröer found at the time were that some family in the village of Oberufer – Oberufer is on an island off the island of Schütt, which is formed by the Danube just below Bratislava and is from Bratislava, so that it can be reached by cab in just half an hour. In this village of Oberufer, which was a rich farming village in those days, a respectable farming family would generally own these games. And when the harvest work was over in the fall, the farmer would gather the people, older and younger boys from the village, who were to play. Women were not allowed to play, I must explicitly note that, which of course must be different for easily understandable reasons in our performance today. The older and younger boys who were to play had to learn their roles in October and November until Advent. That these plays were performed with great seriousness, but without any sentimentality, can be seen in particular from the following. It was by no means a matter of playing a mere comedy, but those boys who were to play had to fulfill conditions that were perhaps not so easy for some of them. They had to commit themselves to leading a completely honorable life during the weeks in which they had to prepare for the games; not to sing any rogue songs during that time, and so on. Furthermore, during all this time, they had to follow the instructions given to them by the master of the game to the letter. Under these conditions, the roles were then assigned and learned. The roles of Mary and Eve were also always played by a younger boy.

When Christmas time approached, when everyone had learned everything, it was arranged that the angel, whom you will also see here, who led the whole group with a star, dressed up and that the procession of players set off from the teacher's house. The angel was already dressed, but the other actors had not yet dressed at the teacher's house; the actors then carried a large, as it was said, Kranawittbaum, which is a juniper tree that served as a Christmas tree. So they went, singing all kinds of Christmas carols, from the master's house to the inn, where the things were to be played.

While they were parading with their big tree, the devil, who had also already dressed and whom you will also get to know in the plays, was meanwhile busy doing all sorts of stupid things. He ran through the whole village with a cow horn, through which he blew terribly, and shouted into all the windows that people had to come to the play. When a wagon passed by, the devil jumped up on the wagon and shouted and tooted from above down, and so on. Then this procession moved little by little towards the inn. There it was arranged that the guests were seated on a number of chairs arranged in horseshoe rows. In the middle was the playground, the stage. And then these plays were performed, which we will see and hear here. Usually the shepherds' play was performed first, which you will see here as the second play. In reality, it was performed first in Oberufer; we are performing it second here. Then came the Paradeis play, which we are performing first. And then came a carnival play, which we have not been able to perform so far because we have not learned it yet, but we may perform it again. Just as in ancient Greece, a so-called satyr play, a comic play, followed the serious performances, a carnival play followed there as well. It is interesting that those people who played the holy characters had a certain prestige from playing Mary and Joseph and the others, and that they were not allowed to play in the carnival play. So the matter was already held sacred. The plays were very well received by the farmers of Oberufer at the time. Only: the entire intelligentsia – as is sometimes the case with such things – was hostile to the performance of these plays. This intelligentsia believed that there was nothing cultured about the plays. So the whole intelligentsia was against it. It was only good for the village that this whole “intelligentsia” consisted only of the schoolmaster, the notary and the municipal council official. But they were all gathered in a single person. So this intelligentsia was indeed unanimous, but it consisted of only one person.

These plays were performed. They are basically the real continuation of the way such things have been performed throughout Europe for centuries, but which had been lost by then. We can prove that as early as the 12th century an Adam and Eve play was performed throughout Europe. At the Council of Constance in 1417, such a Christmas play was performed before the emperor in Constance. At one point in the play, you will see that when the Rhine is mentioned, it is clear that the plays really come from a more western region and were introduced in Hungary. In Hungary, the farmers kept the plays pure and true. As a result, I would say that the plays bear their origin on their foreheads, from centuries past to the present. Some things have changed a bit over time since the 16th century. For example, the three shepherds that you will see already exist in the oldest game, but the three innkeepers in the game, as it is no longer played in Oberufer, were not three innkeepers, but rather an innkeeper, his wife, the innkeeper's wife, and a maid.

Now you will see two of our innkeepers here, who are quite cruel and reject Mary and Joseph; the third will then be kind. In the very first play, it was the innkeeper who did not accept Joseph and Mary but threw them out; the innkeeper's wife also did not accept them; only the maid showed Joseph and Mary the stable. For example, when things started in Oberufer, they didn't have the necessary material; of course, you always had to have very young boys to play the roles of Mary or the landlady. Often there weren't enough of them, and the roles had to be taken on by older boys. That's obviously where the innkeeper, landlady, and maid were transformed into one innkeeper and two more innkeepers. These plays have undergone many transformations over the centuries. The spectators, who were then to come to the plays – they were always performed on Wednesdays and Sundays between three and five o'clock in the afternoon – had to pay two kreutzers, or four rappen; children paid half. And the performances were, as I said, understood without sentimentality, but with a certain real moral seriousness. This can be seen from the fact – as Schröer himself once experienced, for example – that the actors once refused to play in a village – they then went around the neighborhood to perform the plays there – where they were met by a gang of musicians. They said: “Do you perhaps think that we are comedians? We won't put up with that!” – And they didn't perform the plays. They wanted the matter treated as a very serious one.

And when the plays had made their impression on the people, then it can be said that in these areas the memory of what these plays had to say as a simple, unadorned retelling of the biblical stories really did endure for a very, very long time and was very beautiful. It was truly a celebration of Christmas for these villages, which had an extremely significant moral and social influence, deeply affecting the minds of the people.

Karl Julius Schröer collected these plays; they have now been printed. But it is very significant that Schröer no longer found the manuscripts, which were rewritten, with the German people, but with a farmer named Malatitsch, that is, with a Slavic farmer. In more recent times, what the entire configuration of the Austrian state had actually brought about over the centuries had flooded in. The heads of state of Hungary and Austria themselves had always issued calls because they needed the influence of Western German culture. As a result, farmers moved there, and these colonies, these German colonies, emerged in the Spiš and Banat regions. These people also moved to other areas, to the Bohemian areas, to Transylvania. They formed a cultural impact everywhere, which is inside the other, but in more recent times it has been flooded by what has passed over it. Schröer is one of those people who studied German folklore in the Austro-Hungarian areas. Decades ago, I got to know in his company how he followed the traces of this old culture in the middle of Austria, and it is a very significant memory for me, what I was able to learn at his side about this culture and its development back then. Schröer not only collected these Christmas plays, but he also compiled grammars and dictionaries from the dialects and accents of the various regions of Austria, in western Hungary, in the Gottschee region, in Transylvania, and in the so-called Heanzen area. This man was one of the last people in the world to compile all of this material from living history. He did so with love, and it was love that preserved these pieces, which we are trying to reproduce here.

So, dear attendees, we have come to these pieces and incorporated them into our work here at the Goetheanum, because we are striving to truly cultivate everything that emerges in the spiritual life of humanity. What is usually said about us is mostly nonsense. What we are really doing here is based on an interest in everything that lives spiritually in humanity. These plays have really emerged from a general human interest. When they were performed, Catholics and Protestants sat together in the audience, because that is who was in the area at the time. And among the actors there were both Catholics and Protestants. From this you can see that everything that was alive in these plays had a moral and religious thread, but nothing that was somehow denominational. This is what should be particularly emphasized.

Now I will explain a few more expressions from the Paradeis play, that is, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, and from the Shepherds play, so that they are not incomprehensible. The star-scissors are the device with which one can push the star far away from oneself and then bring it close again. And these star-scissors are carried by the leader of the whole, with the star. Here we have arranged things so that, in addition to the bearer of the star, the angel also carries a star, but the star-scissors are what can be used to push the star back and forth.

A scream, as you will hear it here in the play, is the same as a rumor. That which is told about someone. All sorts of things are told. A scream, a gossip has arisen. Then you hear the expression gespirrt = closed, locked.

Then in the shepherd's play, when the innkeeper wants to boast:

I åls a wirt von meiner gstålt,
Håb in mein haus und logament gwålt —

does not mean, as one might easily believe, that he means that the innkeeper has a particularly beautiful stature and therefore has special power in his house. Rather, it means: an innkeeper of my reputation, of my standing, an innkeeper who is as well-positioned as I am, has power in his house, that is, to allow people to move into his house.

Then one of the shepherds says to the other that he has lent his gloves to him again and again, that is, repeatedly. Then you will hear the word: Es hat sich etwas verkehrt. That means in those areas, something has happened, something has occurred, something has taken place. Then spiegelkartenhal. That means there was black ice, so you can easily fall over. The forest birds are singing. That means the birds are already chirping. The coachman cracks his whip.

Then I would like to draw your attention to the beginning of the play, where God speaks to Adam, whom he made out of clay, out of earth, which apparently does not rhyme, but in the local dialect it is:

Adam, take the living breath = clay.

You don't have to imagine Rieben, as if it were badly pronounced, but that's what the farmer says instead of ribs. Rieben. So Eve is not made from a turnip, but from a rib = Rieben, and it rhymes correctly with love.

She is made from your ribs at the same time,
so you must love her a little.

Råtzen is something you talk about. The devil has a råtzen, that is, he takes pleasure in something. Frozzelei, that is: to make a fool of, to lead around by the nose. This is also an expression that the devil will use. — Logament. The farmer usually says it when he speaks of his inn or his house; he pronounces it in a very educated way, at least he thinks he does: in my logament — so that one does not notice that he is using a foreign expression. Then:

Had Adam and Eve eaten Kletzen.

Kletzen are dried pears and plums that people prepare, especially at Christmas.

These are some things that I wanted to mention in advance so that the expressions are not left unintelligible. Otherwise, I would just like to say that, of course, the plays must speak for themselves by expressing in a simple and unadorned way what people could take from the stories of the Old and New Testaments, what should pass into their minds and hearts.

I ask you to receive them as they are meant. The plays should be accepted without pretension. Of course, we cannot reproduce them exactly in the same form as the farmers performed them; but as far as we can, we should try. Our friend, Mr. Leopold van der Pals, has once again tried to renew the music. You will find it as an accompanying piece. There will be a short break between the plays. In between, we will play some Christmas music by Corelli and an Adagio from the first Bach sonata. I have taken the liberty of saying the most important thing about the Christmas plays at the beginning.

We will take the liberty of showing you Christmas games from ancient folklore today. The two games that we are presenting here were found by Karl Julius Schröer in the 1850s in the German-speaking enclaves in Hungary, in the area north of the Danube and west of Bratislava. Germans immigrated to these areas at the end of the Middle Ages and even a little later. Among other cultural possessions that they owned in their simplicity, they also brought these Christmas plays with them to their new homes.

Karl Julius Schröer, with whom I talked a lot about these things in my youth, who was able to tell me from his personal experiences how, in turn, in his youth - in the forties and fifties of the last century - among these, I would say Slavic and Magyar populations, these Christmas games were always performed by the devious Germans living there, and they really had an extraordinarily serious effect on the minds of these people around Christmas time, with great zeal.

In these Christmas games, we therefore have germs that have gradually developed from a longer cultural tradition that we can trace back to the 13th century. So that until the last decades of the 12th century, the need arose to present to the people, in a dramatic way, what refers to the biblical story, what refers to the Christian traditions, namely also to the Christian legend, throughout the widest areas of Central Europe – through Thuringia to the Rhine and across the Rhine to Alsace, then through all of southern Germany, through northern Switzerland.

It can be said that much of modern drama is based on these mystery plays – that is what they are called, after all.

Initially, these plays were linked to church services. When Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Corpus Christi and many other holy festivals approached, people gathered in the church. The church itself was decorated in the most diverse ways. And in the 12th and 13th centuries, the clergy themselves performed, initially in Latin, what was contained within the Christian tradition, within the Gospel story.

So we can easily trace back how, for example, the scene at Christ's tomb was dramatically depicted. Three priests dressed as women: the three women who came to the tomb; an angel sitting on the tomb that had just been left. What the Gospels tell us, what tradition has preserved, was dramatically depicted.

But people also gradually began to present the things that were initially presented in Latin in the vernacular. And in the 14th century we already see very elaborate dramatic presentations, for example of the story of the wise and foolish virgins.

We know that in 1322 in Thuringia, at the foot of the Wartburg, in Eisenach, in the house “die Rolle”, a play about the wise and foolish virgins was performed that was so significant in the fate of a person that the landgrave Frederick, who was present, who has the remarkable epithet, “with the bitten cheek,” that the landgrave Frederick with the bitten cheek had a stroke from it and even died in 1323 as a result of this impression.

But not everyone felt the same way; rather, it was precisely what was presented by such performances that was extraordinarily solemn in those times. For a long time, the dramatic representation that was given in Eisenach and made such a great impression was lost. The play was later rediscovered, curiously in Mulhouse in Alsace, at Tegernsee and in a monastery in Benediktbeuern, so that one can see, precisely from this appearance at Tegernsee, that these things actually moved from the south to the north.

We then very soon find that it is no longer only clergy who present these things, but that these things have been taken up by the people and become very dear to the people. The people were extremely fond of them. We see what has been carried out. We can still see this in one piece of writing that has been preserved. We learn from this writing that in the 15th century the entire story of Christ Jesus on earth was performed: from the wedding at Cana in Galilee to the resurrection. And everywhere we see that the most effective moments, the moments that were most effective for the external view, were emphasized in an extraordinarily dramatic and spiritual way, always the things that the people themselves experienced in these performances. And we may assume that in the 15th century, at the end of the 16th century and for a large part of the German-speaking areas, these folk plays were performed at Christmas time, at Easter time, at Whitsun, on Corpus Christi and at other festivals.

One of the Christmas plays is a “Paradeis” play, which was more closely associated with the Advent season; the other is a direct Christian shepherd play, which we are presenting here before you. As you will see from the introduction to the second play, it was performed throughout the Rhine region, and these plays were also performed on the road. Nevertheless, as Schröer found them, they came, as I said, to the Oberufer, to the Pressburg area – as they are also called Oberufer Christmas plays – for performance, east of Pressburg. So they were played there during the Christmas season, even though they originated quite elsewhere. Originally they were played where the Rhine flows through. They were taken along by a community that had migrated eastwards and settled east of the Danube in Banat and so on. There these games were continued until well into the 19th century. In recent times, many such treasures of the people were lost due to the events of the time, which became quite different. But those who still saw the plays were deeply moved, not only by the play itself, but especially by the way in which these plays were introduced.

When the grape harvest was over, in the fall, the clergyman and a few others, the local teacher, gathered the young men they thought capable of staging such a Christmas play. For many weeks, the exercises, the preliminary exercises, were practiced. And from the way in which people had to prepare for the solemnity of these plays, one can see the spirit in which such things were undertaken. There lived, I might say, an inwardly cozy Christianity, an inwardly cozy Christianity. One sees it in the whole way of introducing such plays. There were definite rules according to which these games were prepared for many weeks. The clergyman or the teacher gathered the boys together. As a rule, the female roles were also played by boys; we cannot imitate that here. Our female members would protest too much against that, but in the Oberufer area, where Karl Julius Schröer discovered these things, it was definitely boys who also played the female roles. These youths were given strict rules. Rules were made that are now, as we have been trying to revive these plays within our circles for years, for those of our honored listeners who wish to attend. These rules no longer have the same significance for our performers, but they show us how seriously these things were taken. For example, one of the rules was that those who were to participate in the play had to lead honorable lives for the many weeks, especially evening after evening for all those weeks, while they were going through these rehearsals. Well, it goes without saying that our people always lead honorable lives! So this rule has no further significance for us. Furthermore, no mischief was allowed. That should not be the rule among anthroposophists. However, there was also a regulation, a kind of punishment, which we are not introducing here simply because there would be too much protest against it, and if it were necessary to demand it, it would not be adhered to. It was a strict rule that for every memory lapse that occurred during the dress rehearsal and especially during the performances themselves, strict penalties had to be paid by the fellow player! As I said, we cannot introduce that. Because these penalties would never be paid by us.

But now there was one very strict regulation, ladies and gentlemen, that we cannot introduce at all. This strict regulation was that during the rehearsals, the rehearsers had to be strictly obedient to the clergyman or teacher, that is, to everyone who had to be a teacher. Well, you will understand that we can never introduce that among ourselves, of course. But you can see from these strict paragraphs how extraordinarily seriously this matter was taken. And it is this seriousness that strikes you when you delve into the whole way in which these games were played. Not sentimentally, often interspersed with a delightful sense of humor, these things were originally given by the clergy out of their sense of the people, but the people took hold of them and absorbed them completely in their spirit. So that, as they are presented here, they are thoroughly folksy and take us back to the feelings, the perceptions, the thoughts of a part of Christian society in the 16th century, perhaps still in the 15th century. All this comes to mind when we look at these games.

We may imagine that over a large part of Central Europe, over the areas I mentioned earlier, from the 14th century into the following centuries – in some areas, as you can see, this only gradually disappeared in the 19th century – at all so-called holy times these plays, that is, the Christmas play, the Easter play, the Whitsun play, were performed. And the way in which these people have brought Christianity to life within them, how they present the Gospels to us in an extraordinarily vivid and popular way, shows that they have made a deep impact on the people. And we also consider it our task to draw attention to how the spiritual life has been preserved through the centuries, and how a part of the spiritual life of Central Europe has been preserved. Those who have seen how this spiritual life of Central Europe, insofar as it was folk life, gradually died out in the second half of the 19th century, will be able to feel a lot through this resurrection of old folk times. It is in this spirit, ladies and gentlemen, that we would like to present the Paradeis play to you today, followed by the Christ-Birth play.

The two Christmas plays to be performed today were performed in the same way as they have been played over the centuries until the mid-19th century in the German-speaking communities in Hungary, a little east of Pressburg and north of the Danube, in the area known as Oberufer. At that time, Hungary was thoroughly permeated by German colonists in these areas, both north of the Danube, past the Carpathians and south of it into Transylvania, thus across the Spiš region, then again towards Banat, the area of its west, who had been immigrating to Hungary from the west for several centuries, taking their cultural treasures with them. And these games are probably the most valuable of these cultural treasures. These games take us back to the 11th century. They originated from the impulse of that which takes place in the churches and has an effect on folklore, the content of the sacred legends, the content of the Bible, in a dramatic way.

Originally, it was really like that, as it was in Greece, where all the drama emerged from the Dionysus plays. It was similar in the Middle Ages from the 10th and 11th centuries onwards. They decorated the altar and the rest of the church. At first, it was clergy who performed these plays. We find as far back as the 11th century three clergymen dressed as women performing the scene at Christ's tomb in the church itself, after the death had occurred. Two of the priests portrayed the women who had come to the tomb, the third the angel. This is basically one of the oldest motifs, and these things originated from such biblical motifs. We then find, for example, that a very frequently performed play was one that presented three consecutive scenes: the women's walk to the tomb of Christ, the Savior's conversation with Magdalene, and then a chorus of the women and disciples as the third part.

These things were developed more and more. At the beginning of the 14th century, for example, we find that in most areas of Central Europe, quite large and significant plays were sometimes performed at Christian festivals. We are told, for example, how on April 24, 1322, in Thuringia, at the foot of the Wartburg, in the house “die Rolle”, a play was performed by the ten virgins, the wise and the foolish virgins , and the entire period that followed is recorded in reports that have been left over, which describe the extraordinarily impressive nature of this performance of Sunday Misericordiae, on April 24, 1322. Indeed, the impressive nature of the performance is described in a very real way. One of the participants in this play was Landgrave Frederick, who bore the curious epithet “with the bitten cheek”; this Frederick, who was apparently somewhat weak when he participated in this play of the wise and foolish virgins, was so moved that he was struck down by a stroke and lived for barely two more years, dying in 1323. This play was then found in Mulhouse, has now also been printed and is one of the most interesting monuments of dramatic art that has emerged from the church, that is, from the sacred action that has gradually been transformed into perception.

We then have a very interesting play from a somewhat later period, which even has about 1340 verses and which has been preserved in a St. Gallen manuscript. It contains the entire Holy History from the Wedding at Cana in Galilee to the Resurrection, and in an extraordinarily impressive way, in that the scenes where Christ is active as a teacher are emphasized throughout. And the way in which the scenes were staged seems to reveal an extraordinarily skillful dramatic plot. The process was so well presented that at first only a few scenes were shown in a very dramatic way, interspersed with narration and pantomime. So when we go back to the 12th or 13th century, the presentation is such that something particularly gripping is presented, then pantomime follows and then there is narration again. But gradually this way of presenting things moved completely into the dramatic. You can also see how things from the church gradually grew into the profane. The oldest pieces that have been preserved were written in Latin. Then only the headings and individual sentences were in Latin, the text in the vernacular, and then gradually, as we move into the 15th and 16th centuries, the pieces are written entirely in the vernacular, and they also penetrate from the church outwards.

The plays that are presented to you today were performed in the vicinity of Pressburg, especially in the vicinity of the Oberufer region, in the inns, so the matter gradually penetrated from the church into the people. We see how, with tremendous seriousness, what could be felt and sensed by the people through the Christ impulse lives in these plays. Later on, one sees how more and more traditions that are not in the Bible but that are present in tradition are incorporated into these pieces in the secular legend. The plays were performed not only at Christmas but also at Easter, at Pentecost, at Corpus Christi, in some areas at the feast of St. Rosalie and so on, but they always followed what the church calendar offered. It can be seen everywhere how the sentiments from the Holy History, which run according to the course of the year, are also contained in these pieces, so that we have received a wonderful piece of genuine folk culture through which we can see back into the centuries of spiritual life, as it was in Central Europe and then taken over to the East. We still have such a wonderful piece of folk culture in it.

In the later pieces, we must particularly admire the fact that, on the one hand, a real seriousness, a great seriousness and a truly Christian attitude live in the pieces, but that they are not sentimental at all. To interpret such pieces sentimentally in the performance would be a completely erroneous note, because in the people, even in the most sacred, a healthy sense of humor always plays a role. And one can say: it is precisely in this that the true seriousness is expressed, that the people did not become sentimentally untrue, but brought their humor into it, and yet also expressed the full seriousness of the sacred story.

These two pieces also come from this tradition. They must have originated in completely different areas than the one in which they were last found, because in the introduction to the second piece we will hear how reference is made to the sea and the Rhine; the sea, which could be Lake Constance, and the Rhine, which in any case does not flow in the Bratislava area. So these plays originally came from the west and were brought to Hungary by German colonists migrating east, where they then continued to be performed. And Karl Julius Schröer, who saw the plays performed and wrote them down in his book “Deutsche Weihnachtspiele aus Ungarn” (German Christmas Plays from Hungary), after listening to those who performed them and they remembered for the performance, listened to and wrote down, not copied from somewhere, but written down according to the wording, because the people held these pieces in extremely high esteem and kept them safe. There have always been a few respected families within the village, in most villages even only one, who kept the manuscript. It was always passed down from father to son. And when Christmas time approached, when the grape harvest was over in the fall, the person who had the manuscript would gather together with the clergy, the local pastor, those boys whom he considered suitable to perform the play that year. The female roles were also played by boys, something that we cannot imitate here, although we try very hard to stay in the style of the performance, because our women would remonstrate too much if we only had the plays performed by men. It would not be possible to do such a thing in our country. But otherwise we do indeed remain in the style that has been preserved into the 19th century.

In my youth, I talked a lot about these things with my revered teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, who was completely immersed in these matters. We talked a lot about the way these plays were performed, and it is quite possible, even though we work under completely different conditions, not in a rural inn or the like and not with the direct participation of the entire population, as it was there, it is still possible to stay in the style approximately. The seriousness with which these people approached the matter could be seen from the fact that strict rules were in place regarding how the people who took part in the performance as actors should live. From the moment they began rehearsals after the grape harvest, they practiced the whole week. From the grape harvest until Christmas, when the performance took place, strict rules were given by their teacher, pastor, teacher and by the master who had the piece. Such rules, which extended to the whole life of these boys, show how seriously the matter was undertaken. We hear, for example, that the people who were to participate had to fulfill one condition. We do not need to prescribe this because it goes without saying that anthroposophists lead honorable lives, but this does not always seem to have been the case with the local boys. So the strict rule was given: the boys must lead honorable lives the whole time while the rehearsals are taking place.

The second condition that had to be observed was this: they must not sing any roguish songs during the entire time. Now, I have never heard anthroposophists sing roguish songs, so this condition does not apply to our fellow players! However, we cannot fulfill the third condition, which was set by the teachers for the local boys. That is that they must obey their teachers in the strictest way while the rehearsals are taking place. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that is not feasible for us! So such a regulation would not help us at all. Nor could a regulation be enforced that stipulates that penalties must be imposed for every memory error, because, firstly, our people claim that they do not make any memory mistakes, and, secondly, they would never pay a penalty!

But you can see from these strict conditions that the matter was taken extremely seriously. It is truly a wonderful Christian life that has been preserved. Under modern conditions, these things are also being completely lost. For years, we have considered it one of our tasks to present such things, which lead more than any theoretical historical reflection into the life of the past, in turn vividly to the minds of the present, and we believe that it is really possible in this way to show how Christianity from the 11th to the 19th century lived in numerous minds in Central Europe, far to the south. We believe that it can be shown how Christian sentiment was present in the hearts of these people, and that what they achieved and showed in such games at all times of the year was an expression of their Christian sentiment.

We will take the liberty of presenting to you in the next few days some German Christmas plays that have been preserved from older folklore. Today we will begin by presenting a so-called Paradeis play. These Christmas plays are deeply rooted in Central European-German folklore and, when viewed today, are actually a living historical representation. The revival of these plays gives us a much more vivid picture of the development of the people than any other historical account. In Europe, drama originated from church performances. We can trace such church performances historically quite far back, to the 12th century; but they actually go back much further. From the 12th century, there are reports of a frequently performed ecclesiastical drama called “The Antichrist”; this “Antichrist” existed in the most diverse forms. And it is extraordinarily remarkable to see how magnificent struggles were depicted in this “Antichrist”, which took place between the European and Asian peoples.

Later, the suffering and birth of Christ and other church memories were first presented by clergymen in the churches themselves. They then became secular events, with the clergymen first performing these sacred plays outside the church, and then the performances were also taken over by secular persons.

One particularly noteworthy play, for example, was that of the “Ten Virgins”. A performance of the “Ten Virgins” that took place in Eisenach in 1322, at the foot of the Wartburg, was so moving that the present Landgrave Frederick “with the bitten cheek” was disconsolate that, as this play stated, it was not possible for even the Holy Virgin to redeem the exiles through her intercession. The powerful impression made on him by this play with this tendency struck him down. He wasted away and died as a result of the impression made on him by this play of the “Ten Virgins.” This story is told a great deal throughout the Middle Ages that followed. In short, we find traces of such sacred plays throughout Central Europe,

These spiritual plays, which then became popular, appear to us in the following centuries in the most varied forms as festival plays, Christmas plays, Easter plays or carnival plays. It is particularly interesting to note how we can follow the migrating German tribes taking these plays with them on their wanderings.

We must be clear about the fact that more German tribes living in the west of Central Europe, who then moved eastwards, to Austria, populated the Bohemian regions, but especially Hungary, took their games with them as a precious, sacred possession and performed these games in an extraordinarily remarkable way. These games lived on in the people without the educated classes taking much notice of them. It was only when German studies of antiquity gained a certain depth in the 19th century that individual scholars of antiquity began to perform these plays based on popular tradition. One of those who went to great lengths to track down such folk traditions in the most diverse German areas of Hungary was my old friend and former teacher Karl Julius Schröer. It is thanks to him that the German Christmas plays, especially from the Pressburg area, have been preserved, at least in writing. Karl Julius Schröer found these Christmas plays in northwestern Hungary, in the Pressburg area, in the so-called Oberufer area. These Christmas plays showed, through their content and language, that they had been brought from more western areas by German tribes migrating east. Schröer was able to establish that such Christmas plays were handed down from generation to generation like a sacred treasure, rehearsed each time the Christmas season approached, and then performed at Christmas time. These Christmas plays were in the possession of one particularly favored family. When the grape harvest was over in the fall and the country folk had some free time, the owner of the manuscript of such Christmas plays would gather the local boys he thought suitable and prepare them for performance at Christmas time by rehearsing them.

There was something very special about such performances; they were treated as having a deeply religious side. This is evident from the strict rules that existed for those who had rehearsed these plays for many weeks under the direction of the master. Such rules were, for example, that those boys who were chosen to study and perform this Christmas play had to show unconditional obedience to their master in an extraordinary way during the time of rehearsals; that they had to lead a moral life during this time. The special rule was that during this time they were not allowed to go to the Dirndl, as the vernacular put it. When the Christmas plays were rehearsed, they were usually performed in an inn, and in a truly folksy way. As best as possible today, we want to capture this folksy quality in our performance, so that, in a sense, the way Christmas was celebrated within this tradition can come to life before our eyes.

A special feature of these plays was their use of folksy humor. And it is quite wrong to perform these folk plays sentimentally. All sentimentality must be avoided. If you perform them sentimentally, you simply show that you have no understanding for an element that was particularly present in the religious life of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times. People could be deeply religious, but they were so in a humorous way, without false mysticism, without sentimentality. And they could tell genuinely folksy jokes and display genuinely folksy humor between descriptions of the most exalted scenes. People did not want to unlearn how to laugh by looking up to the most exalted things in prayer. This is characteristic of the special religiosity of earlier times, which was healthy in this respect. It was only in later times that religiosity became unhealthy.

Today we will take the liberty of presenting the play that usually preceded the others: the Paradeis play, depicting how God leads Adam and Eve into paradise and how they are tempted by the devil. “Adam and Eve” is the festival that precedes December 25th in the calendar, the actual Christmas. And for the Christmas season, which was later the Christmas season, something like the Christ-Birth Play, which we will allow ourselves to do tomorrow, was usually planned for the Christmas season, followed by this Paradise Play.

In this performance, the text of the introduction to the “Paradeis-Spiel” reconstructed by Rudolf Steiner was spoken for the first time. - No transcripts are available of the performances on December 25 and 26.

This Epiphany play ¹ belongs to the series of Christian festivals that my old teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer found in the Oberufer region, in western Hungary, near Pressburg, about seventy years ago. In this Oberufer region in Hungary, there are scattered German villages, especially in Slavic areas; villages that still had a rich use of the German language around the mid-19th century. The German tribes that settled there belonged to the Saxon tribes, the same tribes as those who live on the southern edge of the Carpathians, in the Spiš region, and who also live in Transylvania. Other German tribes are the Swabian tribes, who live more in the Banat. These are the German tribes that probably moved from western areas of Central Europe, even from areas on the Rhine, from the Siebengebirge, even further east during the 15th and 16th centuries, and settled as colonists in the Hungarian areas. However, in the second half of the 19th century, these areas were forcibly Magyarized, and most of the German element was lost, along with such folk traditions as these Christmas plays, the Epiphany play, and so on.

These plays take us back to the times when Christian pageants spread throughout all of western and southern Germany, and also over a large part of Switzerland. We can trace these pageants back to the 11th, even the 10th, century. The oldest forms are performed in the churches, at Christmas, where the manger has been set up, and where the clergy themselves - initially in Latin - have performed this festival. For the concepts of the time, this performance in Latin was no more disturbing than the reading of the Latin mass is for Catholicism today. Later on, you come across such festivals, which have the Holy History, the birth of Christ, the appearance of the shepherds, the three wise men and so on as their subject, but then in the local language and in fact in the dialect, only interspersed with Latin expressions. Later, they were also performed by lay people, no longer by clergy, and migrated from the church to other public places, especially in inns, where they were then performed by lay people. Such festivals were taken by the tribes migrating from west to east, these colonists, and they really revered them like a shrine.

When the grape harvest was over in the fall, the person who had the manuscripts of these plays – usually a member of a well-respected village family – gathered the young men of the village. Women were not allowed to participate, not even as actors. He gathered together the local youths he considered suitable and spent months rehearsing the pageant with them in the run-up to Christmas. The entire production was an extraordinarily solemn affair. The teacher had written strict rules and handed them out to the youths, and everyone had to comply with them. For example, they had to abstain from drinking during the entire period, as emphasized in these regulations; they had to lead a moral life; and they had to fulfill similar regulations that meant something extraordinary, especially within the village community. So the approach of these festivities was really looked forward to in a festive mood. And when the performances came around at Christmas and on Epiphany, the villagers would gather in the appropriate inns. The benches were placed against the wall and the play was performed in the middle of the hall.

We have tried, as far as our circumstances allow, to imitate the way the performance took place within the folklore. Of course, not everything can be imitated, especially not the arrangement as it was in the inn; we choose the stage-like arrangement. But in everything else, we have tried to follow tradition as far as possible, in order to present the plays to today's audience in such a way that they can get an idea of how such festivals were performed.

Another thing I would particularly like to emphasize is that in these plays we can see how a truly pious mood, a solemn mood devoted to the Holy Story, is everywhere combined with humor. The devil, for example, is everywhere the evil enemy of mankind, but at the same time he is a funny character. And in a similar way, healthy humor, a healthy folk humor, plays into the solemn, religious mood. This is what must be emphasized, because this is precisely what was present in the popular piety of these areas, and it was preserved in the German colonists of Hungary until the 19th century in such a way that there was no sentimentality in this religious popular sentiment, but rather a naive originality that allowed even the most sublime things to be mixed up with humor.

During these festival performances, we have something that brings to life times that have now passed for centuries in a much more vivid and lively way than ever before. The 15th and 16th centuries are brought back to us. So we must try to preserve the dialect in an appropriate way, and, as well as we can, try to reproduce these plays in the dialect in which they were performed in the 19th century in the German-speaking areas of Hungary. Precisely because a piece of intellectual life from an earlier time can be brought back to the attention of those currently living, we make it our special task within the Anthroposophical Society to bring these plays to the public.

Later, many such Christmas plays were also collected from other regions. They were then collected, for example, in Silesia, where Weinhold did an enormous amount of work in this regard; but they were also collected in the Palatinate region. And it was so remarkable that the basic character and content is essentially the same in all these games; they only differ in dialect, so that one can see that this is common spiritual property from the second half of the Middle Ages, which extends into our present time. And perhaps it is justified to present it to contemporary humanity in the way we do, because this folk heritage is disappearing. Within the village community, of course, the mood no longer exists to cultivate this folk heritage in the same way as before. But Karl Julius Schröer, who collected these things in the 1940s and 1950s, often told me what a profound impression this resurrection of ancient folk customs, performed by the farmers who owned these pieces, made on him. That is what prompted me to suggest years ago that these plays be performed within our society for a wider audience. And it was on the basis of this suggestion that we performed the Christmas Play and the Paradeis Play in the past few days, and today we would like to present the Epiphany Play or Herod Play to you, as it was performed in the 1950s by German colonists in the areas around Bratislava.

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• 1. The introductory words to the performance of the Paradeis-Spiel and the ChristGeburt-Spiel on 4 January 1922 are not available in a transcription.

As we have done for many years, we would like to present a Christmas play to you this year, a folk play that takes us back to a dramatic-political time of the people, a play that has been cultivated long before the modern work of the stage and stage acting arose within Europe, in the newer Europe at all.

The plays that are performed here with us – the Adam and Eve play, which was performed yesterday ¹ and will be performed again in the next few days, and today's play, the Christ-Birth-Play, and the play that will also be performed in the next few days, the Epiphany Play – I first became acquainted with these plays almost forty years ago through my long-dead friend and teacher, Schröer. Karl Julius Schröer was a personality who, in the second half of the 19th century, made a very special contribution to the study of those German dialects that belong to the German colonists who once – probably as early as the 16th century, but certainly in the 17th century – from areas that are are not so far from us here, from southern Germany and perhaps northern Switzerland, to the east; German colonists who settled in western Hungary, in northern and southern western Hungary, and then also in northern Hungary, south of the Carpathians, and in other areas of Hungary.

Karl Julius Schröer traveled to all of these areas and studied the various dialects in the most diverse ways. It was the case that the essence of the people was already in decline even back then; other ethnic groups took in these peoples and absorbed them. They are extraordinarily interesting and beautiful books, which appeared in the guise of a dictionary, but which are nevertheless extraordinarily interesting for anyone who wants to study them. These books are written in the language that, as I said, originated in the western German regions not far from us and was then carried eastward to the Danube and the Carpathians by colonists.

Karl Julius Schröer found these Christmas plays, which we are performing here, among these people in the 1850s; he got to know them there. These Christmas plays probably originated in the 16th century or even earlier among the people when they still lived more in western Germany, as far as the Rhine. We can still see this from certain sentences in the plays themselves. When they had to emigrate, they were taken with them by the people and were performed again and again every year in the colonists' land, in Hungary. The plays listed here were performed every year by the Haidbauern, a group of farmers who live near Bratislava, in what is now Czechoslovakia, and who have long preserved the original style of their ancient folk traditions. These plays were performed there every year in the dialect that these people brought with them from the west to the east.

These folk games have been preserved in a more genuine form among these colonists than in other areas where similar games were also played. For those who have separated from the tribe of their folklore and have gone abroad have truly preserved such things as a sacred treasure. Among the poor people of Oberufer and the neighboring areas on the Hungarian Danube island of Schütt, for example, it was the case that in a particularly respected family, copies of these games were passed down from father to son and from son to grandson. The one who was allowed to preserve these games was usually also the one who had received the oral tradition of how to play them from his ancestors. He was the so-called teacher. He might gather, with an assistant, in the fall, after the grape harvest was over, those local boys whom he considered suitable to perform the games. Only young men were used for this; a practice we cannot imitate. These young men were entrusted with something serious during this time. Above all, they had to lead an extraordinary, moral life and had to live peacefully with the other villagers during the whole period from the grape harvest to Advent. Only then were they considered worthy to actually participate in the games that were performed from Advent to Epiphany.

In these plays, the people expressed what was right for their views, for their aesthetic enjoyment, I would say. But at the same time, these games were - their subjects are taken from the most important parts of biblical history, the most important for the people - an expression of the people's deepest piety. That is why, for example, during the entire period in which the games were practiced, no music was allowed to be performed in the village that was different from the music that belonged to the games. And it has been handed down to us that when some traveling players came to a village, they had the village musicians play in their honor. They were quite indignant: Do they think we are comedians that this music offends us? They regarded the performance of such plays as something quite serious.

Then, when Advent and later Christmas time had arrived, these plays were performed in an inn. The people, however, actually carried their pious, truly pious minds, their holy mood, I would like to say, into this inn. These plays have a genuinely folksy character in that, firstly, they are part of the broad development of European theater. You can see this in the after-effects of the images, because these are always interspersed in the action of the plays. You can see how the theater tradition from ancient Greece has continued in these simple folk plays.

But there is something else that is much, much more important. It is this: that between the most tender, genuine scenes of devotion, there are always interposed scenes of the people engaged in robust fun. This is precisely what is peculiar about these pieces, juxtaposed as they are, for example, with the figure of the Virgin Mary, who is portrayed with extraordinary delicacy and marked with wonderfully pious devotion, and the somewhat clumsy Joseph. The scene where the shepherds exchange funny jokes with one another in the field, and so on, is not particularly delicately depicted in the scene where, for example, the shepherds sacrifice to the child Jesus, in addition to the touching, pious, holy scene. But this shows us how those whose names have not been preserved, who created these plays out of genuine popular sentiment, knew the true, honest piety of the people, which never became sentimental. It was honest precisely when it did not fall into dishonest sentimentality, when laughter and rough jokes could be tolerated at the same time. And in a beautiful way, those who created such plays knew how to shape the coarse folk fun into something that, I would say, wants to reach heaven in a tender, pious worship.

As I said, Karl Julius Schröer still saw these plays performed by the farmers of the Haiddörfer in the 1950s. It was at that time, especially around Christmas time, that I heard about these folk plays from him. He spoke with tremendous inner devotion, because he loved everything that was folksy, and there was something in his words of a reflection of the consecration that the farmers associated with these plays.

He then gave me the little book in which he had followed these plays in the 1960s, and I was able to have many a conversation with him afterwards, in which he carefully pointed out the way in which the dialect was used, the way in which the language was formed in a rural, artistic way, one could say. So we were able to talk about gestures, about the whole structure of the play. It was truly a revelation of genuine folk art; at the time, it really grew quite close to my heart. And when we were able to perform such a play within the Anthroposophical Society many years ago, it was my particular endeavor to always perform these plays at Christmas time, as far as it was possible with the means used, which were available for a stage, so that an image was given of what the people had in ancient times and what they still had in certain areas until recently.

Now these plays have been largely lost. We were allowed to perform the plays even during the war. Friends of ours were allowed to perform them in the military hospitals and to bring joy and satisfaction to the sick with these plays during the terrible war. We have also been performing them here in Dornach for years and will try to do so again this year, so that a real picture is created of the religious content and the folk-artistic striving at the same time.

The content of the performances, ladies and gentlemen, has been handed down from father to son and grandson, and as Karl Julius Schröer recorded it after hearing it, as he recorded it according to what the other performers told him. I only took the liberty of adding something that was not part of the tradition in one instance. You were able to see it yesterday in the Paradise play, and you will see it again when the Paradise play is performed, but I am firmly convinced that this piece was present, and it can only be a matter of of the spirit that lived in the folk at that time, so that a tradition that was already there at the time, that was already present, I would say, in black and white, and only got lost, has now become necessary on the stage. By staging these plays, we are trying to give a true picture of what has been revived in many areas as folklore in the 16th century from the 11th century and what has been most faithfully preserved by the poor people who were then in the process of losing their folklore, a folklore that Karl Julius Schröer wanted to preserve by recording it in dictionaries, books of spoken drama, and by passing it on to us in these Christmas plays.

Many of these Christmas plays have also been collected by others, but it seems to me that these plays of the Haidbauern are the ones in which what once existed in the late Middle Ages has been preserved most purely.

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• 1. On December 23, 1922, two performances of the Paradeis play took place at 5:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., but there are no transcripts are available.